


Lacunae

by Ael_tRlailiiu



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Character Study, Feels, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-12
Updated: 2013-04-23
Packaged: 2017-11-14 02:33:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 6,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/510395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ael_tRlailiiu/pseuds/Ael_tRlailiiu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Character studies, one-shots, and meditations. AKA Where I Keep My Tony Feels:</p><p>1. Space - Pepper on Tony and things<br/>2. Sound - Pepper on Tony and noise<br/>3. Walking, Talking - Steve and Tony talk about the past<br/>4. A Sure Thing - Five times Tony was sure he was going to die<br/>5. Workshop - Five vignettes of Pepper in the workshop<br/>6. Touching Distance - Tony and physical contact<br/>7. Labyrinth - Tony's downward spiral during IM2</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Space

“ _...for all our searchings and suppressings, the past comes unbidden or not at all.” Anthony Lane, essay on_ The Sound of Music _._

  
Pepper almost quit three times in the first month she worked for Tony Stark. He called her Maggie for two weeks straight—the name of the last red-head to hold the job, she eventually figured out. For a while the only thing that kept her going to work was the pitying, weary expression on her predecessor's face when she said, _At least you'll be able to buy some decent shoes, dear._ On average, his PAs lasted three months. Pepper had a deal with herself, that she would do better than that, and the line on her resume would get her something else.

She had never seen anyone so bored with existence. Early on, she made sure she knew the emergency phone protocols in whatever country they were in, in case he decided to trade passive self-destruction for something more interesting.

A year passed, one _just one more week_ at a time.

The first time Pepper saw the Malibu house, she thought some magazine had just been in for a photo shoot. It was clean and empty the way no house is that's actually lived in, without a single photograph, knick-knack, piece of junk mail, or even a half-finished beer lying around. She saw the place messy soon enough—spectacularly so, after a party a couple of weeks after she was hired—but by noon the next day the house was back to its state of fiercely impersonal cleanliness.

It itched at her. Nobody could possibly live like that. When Mr. Stark (he was still Mr. Stark then) flew off to do some talk in England and didn't bring her along, Pepper took to what had to be called snooping. She didn't find anything. It was as if the only history he had was what they printed in the magazines.

The workshop was the exception, and she didn't usually go down there. (The man had robots instead of pets, talked to them the way most people talk to their dogs, except they actually did what they were told most of the time. What the hell was that about.) There were a couple of photographs there, a couple of items that didn't seem to have any purpose, that couldn't be for show because no one ever saw them.

There was a house back east, too. The first Pepper knew about it was the day Tony told her to put it on the market. Obadiah flew out with a team and went over the place to make sure there were no valuable papers or forgotten Picassos lying around. A week later, the house Tony had grown up in and hadn't seen in ten years was sold without so much as a glance.

People gave him things, but he always got rid of them. He gave other people things—extravagant things, showy things, bizarre things. Gave his body with a carelessness that appalled her, gave his time according some whimsical priority scheme she never did fathom, gave the products of his erratic genius whenever Obie rang up to say _DoD bored with their toys, make them fall in love again_. Gave so much away that it was easy for people to think they were getting all of him.

What was flaunted could not be a weakness. What was given could not be taken. She hunted the absences, then, the things that were _not_ given, that no one thought to ask after because they were never exposed to view, when so much else already was. The past was the one thing he protected. She looked again at the things in the workshop and understood—not all of the _how_ , but the what. That these were things that could hurt him, and that he could not quite put away.


	2. Sound

She had been warned about it early on, by any number of harried associates: The thing about Tony is that _he never shuts up._ She found it to be true only for certain values of _never_ , specifically that he talked if he wasn't comfortable.

It might be that he didn't like you. He didn't like many people. After some months to observe, Pepper decided that was fair. Most of the people he talked to wanted something out of him; he wasn't obligated to like them for it. She did wish that he wasn't quite so... blunt. She didn't enjoy tendering apologies.

It might be that he _did_ like you, and didn't know what to do about it.

It might be that he had done something thoughtless (frequent) and felt bad about it (Rhodey and no one else, so far as she could tell).

It might be that something was bothering him that no normal human being had any chance of figuring out.

Between all of that, the space around Tony was usually loud, usually full of music and people and his own chatter, half of it nonsense or things she was never going to understand. Anything important drowned before it had half a chance at being heard.

After a year or so—she wasn't sure exactly when it happened, except that by then she had stopped telling herself she was going to quit—Pepper realized that her presence had been accepted. She could turn the music down (or off) with only a token reprimand. On occasion they had actual conversations, ones that did not _entirely_ consist of him being provocatively ridiculous and her scolding him—nothing deep, but normal talk. One day there was no noise at all, both of them deep in work, and it felt like a victory, like she had earned something shared by very few others.

It was a weird little home, no doubt about that. There were days when she wished he had an Off switch, but against all logic and often against her better judgment, she liked Tony. He was thoughtless, self-centered, frequently drunk, and deliberately absent-minded about anything that didn't have an engine, but in some respects he was one of the easier bosses Pepper had had. He didn't go in for power trips, or the kind of casual cruelty she had often seen go hand in hand with wealth. He flirted as if by reflex, but never made any serious attempt to get her into bed with him. Pepper got to travel the world, talk to interesting people, and had a hand in curating the best private art collection of the 21st century. It was worth the occasional dry cleaning run and then some.

As it turned out, there was an Off switch: three months of total silence. Her hope ran out after two weeks. She did the things that needed doing and waited, and when the word finally came it was not what she had braced herself for.

He came back. She thought—forgive her, but she thought what everyone else thought, that this would be short-lived, that Tony would change his mind, that everything would go back to normal soon. She realized her mistake on Monday morning, trying not to dry-heave with the whiplash of panic and relief and the fact that she had just had her entire hand inside his chest.

_I don't have... anyone but you._

Nothing that happened after that surprised her as much as that beat of silence, or his wry smile, almost an apology. Things frightened her, absolutely—it was her life, too, turned upside down and inside out, and at last her own death looking many-eyed back at her—but it did not surprise her much, because she understood just how different everything was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first two chapters happened after I did a Tumblr post on how freakishly empty Tony's house is; my brain just will not let go of this.


	3. Walking, Talking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve and Tony talk. Tony and Pepper talk. Kind of.

Because he was basically planning an ambush, Steve had given this as much thought as he would any battle plan. He and Tony were alone, that was important, and walking through Central Park, where it would be more or less impossible for the other man to claim any emergency or distraction. Mid-November overcast whited out the sky, not quite ready for snow; the city wore grey, brown, black.

Like New York itself, Tony had buried himself in a dark wool coat that looked like one of Steve's second-hand finds. Steve knew it wasn't quite right to think of him as having a private and a public setting, but did find it interesting that when Tony wasn't putting himself on display, he was more interested in comfort than appearances. The cold didn't bother Steve any more.

He wasn't looking forward to this, but it was going to have to happen sooner or later. It had been six months since the invasion. They worked together well, but Steve always felt a hesitation.

Steve said, “Pepper thinks we ought to talk about Howard.”

“I would rather French-kiss a bacon slicer.”

“I figured that much. I do think we should discuss Afghanistan, though.”

After a beat of silence, Tony said, “Don't tell me you haven't read my file.”

“I have. Have you? The only things in that incident report are a bunch of pictures of dead people, a report from the base hospital that's half illegible and half incomprehensible, and your comment that the catering was lousy.” And Phil's tidy notes about a lot of missed appointments. He paused, then went on, “I don't care if you jerk SHIELD around, that's not my problem. But I need to know, if it ever comes up—and with our lives, it's kind of a given that it will—for the team, I need to know which way you'll jump.” _Need to know if you trust me._

“Straight into trouble, don't you pay any attention?” His voice took on that almost lazy, provoking edge.

“Observation isn't everything. You know I wouldn't ask if I didn't think it was important.”

Tony stopped. Steve kept going—all part of the strategy, do not let this turn into a confrontation—but slowed his pace, and eventually heard Tony start walking again.

For a while they were just two people going in the same direction under the bright and colorless sky. Steve took silence as encouraging, even when it stretched out past five minutes. Tony could have stalked off in a huff, but he was thinking about it. That alone went a way toward easing Steve's anxiety. He looked at the expanse of the park around them, like so many things the same and yet not. The ache would always be there, but every week, every month leached away some of the bitterness surrounding it. Out of all of the loss and changes, he could see that not all of them had been for the worse. He had been told that they still did the Macy's parade. It was going to be a weird holiday season, though, no two ways about that. He stopped and looked at the skyline for a while.

“The thing that's sort of funny,” Tony said eventually, standing next to him, “is that if I hadn't been a dick to Rhodey, he'd probably be dead.”

He told the story with spare, well-chosen words, unhurried and without any outward emotion. Steve listened, and didn't push for more than he was given, and something deep inside him relaxed. One of these days, they would have that other conversation. For now, he knew that if it was important, if it was a team thing, Tony would do what he had to.

It seemed only fair that Steve talk a little, too, about losses that would never leave him. Snow, that was always going to be a thing. Not the first time he had lost a soldier by a long road.

  
  


*

  
  


Pepper woke up when Tony came to bed. She checked the time automatically. Four a.m. was pretty bad, even for him. He didn't usually wake her up; must have been between sleep cycles. She made a little noise so he would know he didn't have to worry about disturbing her. He didn't say anything, kept his distance and shook off her inquiring hand. She came more awake, puzzled.

“I haven't seen you all day, how are you mad at me?” she asked.

“I'm not.”

He didn't usually lie about that; no real point, when arguing was their default form of communication. Asking what was wrong was a waste of time. She lay still and quiet for a bit, breathing. He faced away from her, just as quiet, just as awake. His hair was damp, and she caught a whiff of soap.

“Were you out?” she asked. Finicky as he was, she had never been able to convince him that the smell didn't bother her, the hint of metal and sweat that clung after hours in the suit.

“Just looking around.”

Nothing you need to worry about, she translated. He did that often enough. Not usually until four in the morning, though; even Tony needed _some_ sleep. Pepper stroked the back of his neck, not too lightly. He could be skittish as a damaged horse, even with her. She found knots of tension that flying hadn't eased, but he didn't pull away this time. She dug her thumb in, worked it in a few careful circles, moved over to the other side of his spine. He tensed up further.

She considered going back to sleep. Seriously. She had work to do in the morning, and he could sleep until noon if he wanted to and maybe someday learn to talk about things like a normal person, or at least talk to JARVIS, which was far from normal but seemed to work most of the time. Speaking of, JARVIS would have told her if anything had _happened_. So what was this all about?

“Is this not helping?” she asked, applying herself to the knot.

“Kind of.”

“Yes, it's kind of not helping, or no, it's kind of helping?”

“George Boole rolls in his grave.” He sounded better. She kept working on his knots until her thumb developed an ache, until she realized that under all the tension he was shivering. “I was, by the way.”

“Was what?” She spread her hand, lengthened her strokes. She had found in herself a fascination with his body that had nothing to do with sex, everything to do with strength and fragility.

“Mad at you.”

She frowned. “Why?”

“Talking to Rogers about Dad is not going to help anything.”

Ah. “Maybe it will help _him_.”

“You think? One, I'd probably end up punching him, and two, Captain America doesn't need any help. He's doing fine.”

_As if any of you would know what fine looks like._ “Did you two have an argument?” That happened all the time. They hadn't killed each other yet.

“No. I think we should go home for a little while. Soon.”

“Okay.” Going back to Malibu for a while might be nice. Neither of them was used to cold weather. She wasn't surprised that Tony didn't want to be in New York for the holidays; he usually spent them out of the country entirely. For some things, Pepper had gotten used to not making plans.


	4. A Sure Thing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five times Tony Stark has been certain he was going to die, and four lessons taken.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The run-on sentences are entirely deliberate. The rest of it I'm not sure about.

1\. The first time is the easiest. So quick, so unexpected, so little time to sink in, only shock pain shock blood not happening he's not really going to _die_ and the nightmares go on for a very long time.

If you're angry enough, you don't have to be afraid.

  
  


2\. In the desert there is nothing to do but keep walking toward nothing until the sun finishes him but not on his knees though everything is getting hazy again and one time one more time one time soon it will not come back and not get up _this wasn't the plan_.

Sometimes people are saved when they don't deserve to be.

  
  


3\. Sweet words and gentle hands while his heart stutters and stops, betrayed inside and out. Can't ask why, can't beg, can't fight, can't blink. So this is what grief feels like. Hadn't felt it when his parents died, too long even then since they were his to lose. Losing something that hadn't been there at all—that hadn't _ever_ been there? had been lost somewhere along the road of years when he wasn't paying attention?—this is like fire in a coal seam, leaves scars everywhere it touches and never quite goes out.

People will hate you.

  
  


4\. He thought he had the flu. Then he thought he could fix it. Then the answers evaporated and took all of his certainties with them. So many mistakes no more time, there was supposed to be more time. He hasn't ever wanted to die before, wants it over with, to stop being so fucking scared. Tossup which is worse, the hangover or the despair-anger, can his body not get this basic function right and _stop?_ Thinks about just flying until either he or the suit gives out over the ocean somewhere.

Nick Fury is a self-serving dick (but see also: Lesson 2).

  
  


5\. Above New York, he thinks that he doesn't have to do this. Low on power, but still—could be far enough away before it blows. Would the Hulk survive ground zero? It's kind of horrible to think that he might. Thor? Probably not. Not a chance for anyone else. A million people minimum, just from the blast. He doesn't want to do this, and the light is terrible and beautiful..


	5. Workshop

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five snippets of Pepper in the workshop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My Pepper head-canons are infinite.

Pepper hasn't been down here in the month since the news came. She is not someone who surrenders easily, but that includes surrender to foolish hopes where none should remain. She thinks now that someone ought to tidy the place, take inventory, arrange storage for the cars and everything else. It takes years to declare someone legally dead; no sense letting everything fall apart, and she has nothing better to do. Obie tosses her an assignment once in a while, his look grave and sympathetic, but he has his own staff, and she hardly feels like she's earning her pay.

She thinks sometimes about the things she could be doing with all of this free time—look for a new job, go back to school, have a relationship—and it's still too soon to follow through. There will be plenty of time, now.

Everything is right where he left it, plus a thin layer of dust. There isn't really anything to tidy up. Even You and the others are still, in what passes for robotic slumber. She walks slowly along shelves of technical references, tools, bits and bobs of discarded projects. She can't stand the quiet or the thought of breaking it. Softens her footfalls, makes notes, and stops every few moments to scrub away angry tears.

 

*

 

The air has gone still as the weeks piled up, the last traces of solvent and exhaust gone. She hits buttons with unsteady fingers, opens all the doors to the sea-breeze, starts taking down the dust-cloths hung over the equipment.

She feels watched, and it takes her a moment to remember that she is, that someone has been forgotten in her flurry of stunned communication.

“JARVIS?” She doesn't talk to him all that often, and her voice is tentative.

The response is immediate, polite. “Good afternoon, Ms Potts.”

She clears her throat. “I wanted to let you know that Tony's coming home. They found him.” After a moment she adds, “Alive,” just in case that wasn't clear, because she still can't quite believe it and keeps saying it out loud, keeps looking at her phone and the timestamp on Jim's call. Maybe she won't have to hate her birthday for the rest of her life. “I don't know how long. Maybe a week.”

The silence lasts two entire seconds. “Thank you, Ms Potts.”

 

*

 

She's run through anger and embarrassment and finally decided to be relieved before she leaves the balcony, because at least she hasn't torched her career _in public_. It could never turn out any other way. He's Tony Stark; consequences are for other people. Unfortunately, Pepper Potts is _other people_ , and appalled at herself for how close she had come.

She drives over to the house in the morning and goes downstairs. If there is going to be a gruesome scene, if he's going to fire her (oh god she'll have to _sue_ him) or she's going to quit, she would just as soon get it over with.

He's not home. She counts the cars in confusion. All present. Checks with Happy, who denies all knowledge of Tony's whereabouts. JARVIS says, “I cannot say, Ms Potts,” his tone so dryly resigned that she knows that he has been ordered not to speak to her, and that whatever Tony is doing right now, JARVIS considers it mind-bogglingly stupid. That doesn't narrow it down at all.

He had talked to Obadiah and left—alone, as far as anyone knew. He hadn't had time to get drunk, had obviously arrived home safely and... then what? Found someone more pliable to keep him company, no doubt, but where? He doesn't answer his phone. A litany of increasingly sordid possibilities rolls through Pepper's mind, and the response she'll need to have ready for each of them when the press comes around.

The tabloids will be happy to have him back to his usual self.

The stock is going to drop _again._

By nightfall she's starting to panic. If he's dead in a ditch somewhere because she didn't kiss him, she's going to _kill_ him.

He is not dead in a ditch. She has spent all day working herself up for a proper shouting match and instead finds herself staring in open-mouthed horror.

“Are those... bullet holes?”

All attempts at deflection aside, this is much, much worse than any prior combination of strippers, drugs, and lawbreaking. She's never seen this expression of feral glee before.

 

*

  
She hesitates in the doorway. Silence and half-light usually mean Tony is thinking, not working, and maybe that he would prefer to be alone. His preference might not be the right thing to follow, of course. This is going to be confusing for a while, redrawing all the boundaries they have so carefully constructed. Their lives are two steps forward, one to the side, a fox-trot in a minefield. It takes a moment for her to pick out where he is, sitting at the desk with something in his hands—the one framed photograph in all of these thousands of sprawling square feet.

She retreats without speaking.

  
*

  
The _tick_ of Pepper's heels on the gleaming black floor vanish under an avalanche of guitar chords. Everything is back to normal and nothing is the same at all, and she really ought to be used to this by now. She lets the door close behind her and folds her arms. From the bits and pieces she can see on the table, he's working on one of the suit assemblers. She had no pressing reason to interrupt.

His hair has gone into dark points on the back of his neck. She spends ten minutes studying the neatly defined muscles of his back and arms, the cant of his hips as he changes position, and the tiny, precise motions of his hands, never hesitant or uncertain, and when he finally puts down the soldering pen and realizes that she's there, she pretty much rips his clothes off.

There are perks to this new life. Also costs; Tony being nothing if not accommodating in these matters, her underwear is a total loss, along with a seam on her skirt. Acceptable losses. But she might have to stay out of the workshop from now on.


	6. Touching Distance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's either drown, or die of thirst.

He knew there were SHIELD people outside, keeping an eye on him, but the house itself had been silent and empty since Coulson went off. Not that Tony planned on going anywhere, not when JARVIS had finished half the tests and everything looked okay so far. He gave up trying to do anything else after a while and just watched the data come, stayed put through waves of hope (it was going to _work_ ) and flutters of panic (what if it _didn't_ ). It felt like he had been tired forever. Maybe the shot was wearing off.

Fucking Nick Fury. What the fuck.

He tried to remember something, anything, some hint that would suggest that Fury was right, that there was something he had missed all those years, that would make everything fall into place, that would make it _make sense_. He kept landing on the same old thought: _They should have gotten a cat._

_*_

_Don't spoil the boy_ came early, like washing your hands and putting things away and not asking for a second helping of dessert. _Men shake hands._ You just didn't ask, end of story, didn't do selfish things

_except you did of course you did you felt a little guilty about it but how could you not want things_

like that?

_Better work on that grip._

A peck on the cheek at bedtime.

_Go on now, I'm busy._

*

_Your father and I talked._

_I_ said _I'm sorry about the—_

_It's not about that. We just think that you need more... challenges._

There was a suitcase bigger than he was and a long car ride in utter silence, inevitably dramatized as a political prisoner going into exile. He was the youngest kid there by two years, half the size of most of them, and not the slightest bit interesting to anyone except when he caused trouble.

He caused a lot of trouble. One chilly April night he kissed a girl in a birch grove, and the world opened up like another sky, left him blinking and entranced as he would always be in high places, lured by the promise of the fall (it has a name, _l'appel du vide_ ).

The envelopes that answered his sparse letters got fatter. The cars that carried him back and forth got bigger. The house got nicer, but it was empty more often when he got there.

Summer nights, the lawn filled up with men with decorated chests and women with decorated faces. They all had hard and speculative gazes when they thought no one was watching, and Tony smiled back and doctored his soda. He saw how the women were with Dad (heard Mom's brittle laughter from the other room), heard how he talked about them later, too, and never asked _Did you? Any of those times they offered, did you?_

*

He spent an hour at his desk in his old room. The paper had a dozen half-hearted words, but mostly doodles. He stared at the blank walls, the shelves with their old models and outgrown oddments, the windows. It was snowing. The whole place felt strange, as desperately unfamiliar as something from a dream. The house was full of people, and he recognized a lot of them in a vague way, but the hum of their presence was getting on his nerves, the absence of an absence that would last forever now.

He hunted down Obadiah, waited until he was done with his phone call. _I can't think of anything to say._ He had taken the pen apart without realizing it.

Obie fixed him with those pale, sorrowful eyes and slung an arm over Tony's shoulder, an unfamiliar weight that shocked him into stillness. _If you'd rather not, that's all right._

_No, I... I want to, I think._ He had to say something, didn't he? It wouldn't be right not to. _I just don't know what, I...._

_Tell you something? People mostly want to hear things they already know._ Obie's grip tightened, just a bit, for a

_trapped not right but warm okay things are okay will be okay_

moment and then let go.

In the end, Tony talked briefly and dry-eyed about the things Howard and Maria Stark had done for the world, the things everyone already knew, and Obadiah talked about someone he didn't recognize. After it was finally over he got very drunk, because he couldn't think of any reason not to, because he didn't feel anything, because it hadn't even crossed his mind to go home in between graduating and the call about the accident.

*

It was sometimes weird, afterward, not always but—not full-on flashbacks, just not entirely comfortable, just the tension of extant sense-memory, of helplessness. He hated that, hated knowing that there wasn't any going back, that he couldn't be _fixed_. But right alongside it was Rhodey half-crushing him and trying miserably not to cry, and you couldn't have one without the other, couldn't have that dizzy, blinding relief without the pain, no lift without a fall.

It wasn't the cave that did it, though; it was Obie. Who had welcomed him home with that warm smile and that hand on his shoulder and... and. He couldn't turn around without tripping on the man's corpse, the echo of that approving smile and the disappointed head-shake, the _weight_ and it had never occurred to him until then that anchors had more than one use.

_I don't like being handed things._ He was rich, he was allowed a few eccentricities. It could be a joke, and when it wasn't a joke, when something tripped the wrong switch and sent his heart jack-hammering into the reactor housing, no one had to know any differently.

*

Test data piled up.

It didn't make sense. He could watch that film every day for the _next_ twenty years, and it still wouldn't do any good or make any sense, and he would eventually find himself down some paranoid rabbit hole where people like Coulson lived.

The phone rang. Speak of the devil; no one else Tony knew was speaking to him.

_Hey, Coulson. How's the land of enchantment?_

_Hey, Tony,_ said Vanko.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We've been watching IM2 a lot lately here.


	7. Labyrinth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Character study set during the first half of IM2.

People forget the reason Daedalus had to fly, that he was imprisoned lest he reveal the secret of his earlier creation. Tony's been wandering this maze for weeks, met wall after blank wall, and there is no escape through flight.

It's stupid to be angry, maybe, but then again it's a stupid way to die, and so he's angry about it. He's _tried_. Really, really tried, for the first time in his life. Maybe he doesn't have everything quite sorted out, maybe it won't ever be enough to make up for the past, but he's given it a hell of a shot. He just needs a little more time. He hits another dead end.

The green glop JARVIS came up with keeps the nausea at bay. He can sleep, kind of, but he doesn't do much of that. Work is a way to convince himself that things will be okay, that he'll figure something out. Path after useless path, wall after wall, the options disappear. He stares at the last failure for a long time. This is happening, and he's going to die. It's not the first time he's thought that, but he's never seen it coming weeks ahead of time.

Tony Stark does not have a bucket list. For the better part of twenty years, if he wanted something, he bought it. If he wanted to do something, he did it. He's never thought much about a world without him in it, and the knowledge is a weird, panicky thing that never entirely goes away once it arrives. He tries to distract himself, to find things to do—there's plenty of those, all kinds of practical matters to attend to.

He doesn't mean to say “successor.” It sounds so final. Pepper is too astonished to notice, maybe. She'll do a good job; she always does. That's one thing taken care of. He can't make up his mind about the other part, or about telling them the truth. Maybe he won't have to. Maybe there's still something he missed.

  
  


Monaco. Sunglasses and smiles and he's pretty sure he looks like hell, but no one says anything. The race, well... of course it's a bad idea. It's a horrible idea. What's the worst that can happen, though? If he dies out there on the track, it will be because he fucked up, wasn't fast enough, wasn't good enough. That's _fair._ The track walls curve eternally; no escape there, but no dead ends to face, either. He forgets about all of it for a few lightning-filled minutes, and then a few more. He doesn't want to die.

How did Vanko _know?_

He has to tell her. He's rehearsed this a dozen times. The words line up obediently, and then Pepper looks fond and exasperated, and they go unspoken. He doesn't want to see her expression change, to see confusion, concern, pity (relief?).

He'll tell her tomorrow.

Maybe. It won't help if he does. Won't do any good to say _I think I love you_ or _I wish I'd said something sooner_. This regret business is new and unpleasant, but what the hell—it won't last much longer, right?

  
  


The Vanko files flicker and blur, or maybe it's the headache that's become a constant companion. He knows their contents by heart now, and his mind wanders. Would things have been different if Howard hadn't had to deport his friend and partner all those years ago? Or had the bitterness already set in? It doesn't really matter. He understands that he has been stupid—the lone cardinal sin in the Stark canon. The news reports are right for once; where there is one, there will be others. He can't do anything about it now.

He does not feel fine.

Rhodey is going on about the Senate again, sounds frustrated and angry. Tony would like to tell him that it's not going to matter what they think or what they do, not to him anyway, but mostly he's thinking _I can't do this_. He listens to his heartbeat, pushing the poison around its inescapable circle, counting off hours now, not weeks. Maybe a day, maybe a little longer, maybe not that long. You can't quantify human bodies like pieces of steel, so it has to be tonight.

Or he could spill everything to Rhodey now. _So there's something I need to tell you.... So you know that suit you've had your eye on... Hey, you're not gonna believe this but...._ And then what? Rhodey freaks out. Rhodey tries to make him go to the hospital or something. He doesn't want to die in a hospital, surrounded by strangers and sadness. He doesn't want to die at all, but there's one last wall to hit, and he won't see it until it's right in front of him. He can do this first.

Rhodey will do a good job. He always does. He and Pepper should get together and have highly organized babies. Tony's going to miss them. No he won't, he's going to be dead. Will they miss him? For a little while, maybe.

_Is that dirty enough for you?_

He can't tell. Nothing tastes the way it should anymore. It helps, though, blunts everything a little, numbs his awareness of his body. It's one thing to spend your life believing the universe doesn't care about you, another to feel its blind teeth in your throat. The alcohol makes it easier, and along with the the acid irony of faking his way through one last party even spawns a kind of savage cheer. For all that this is his own plan, he's angry about it, at all of them, even at Rhodey. That helps, too. This has to be convincing.

  
  


That goes well, except for the part where he wakes up afterward. His head is not actually on fire, and he manages not to puke in the helmet. Why... right. There had been a few unbroken bottles left in the wreckage.

This is more weird than anything else. He's too exhausted to be afraid, feels hung-over and empty of volition. What do you with the day after the last day of your life? He doesn't want to hang around the house like a premature haunting. Doesn't want to talk to anyone, if that's even an option. _Really_ doesn't want to turn on the news. He's done with all of it, taken care of the only things that mean anything. May as well find some coffee, watch the sunrise, take one last flight and pick a spot over the ocean.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really don't know what compelled me to write this. Overabundance of sad Tony Feels, I guess.


End file.
